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An Analysis of Image in David Copperfield

Chapter 1
Introduction

"David Copperfield", the masterpiece of Dickens, was a semi-autobiographical work. In May 1849 to November 1850, the installment was published. In the preface, Dickens said: “It is my favorite child.”
The novel depicted David's experiences which were filled with sufferings and laughters. Dickens portrayed the colorful picture of British society, the typical image of different social classes, especially the endless struggle of David in the face of adversity which left a deep impression on us. David was unable to endure the abuse of his stepfather, biting the fingers of his stepfather, savagely beaten. As a result, he was locked in a boarding school. After his mother died, he was sent to the factory as a child by his stepfather. From then on, he lived a hard life, without enough to eat or wear and suffered all kinds of abuse and torture. However, David did not succumb to the mercy of fate, painstakingly, and finally found his aunt Betsey. The kind-hearted aunt shelter adopted him and let him go to a better school. When he knew that Aunt Betsey was bankrupted, but instead, he studied diligently with perseverance all kinds of abuse and torture. Finally, after making efforts, he became a writer and achieved success. At the same time, other characters were clear and vivid. Peggotty was a nurse who took care of David and David’s mother carefully, she was remarkably loyal. Outwardly, aunt Betsey appeared a severe woman, but she showed that she was kind by loving David and others. In addition, Ham was noble, brave and honest. Mr.Murdstones was fierce and cruel. Steerforth was selfish and arrogant.
1.1 Introduction to the Author
Dickens was the main representative of realism literature in the 19th century. The art of witty words, nuanced psychological analysis and realism were combined together closely in his works. He was particularly famous for his vivid comic characterizations and social criticism. He was the first author who had written of the poor with fidelity and sympathy. His works were famous during novels of the Victorian age and among the great classics in all fiction.
Dickens was born in February, 1812, at Landport, Portsmouth. He was the second of eight children. His father was a clerk, hardworking but imprudent, later caricatured as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. In 1822, the family moved to London, where Charles had to leave school to support his impoverished family. In 1824, his father was put into prison for debt. At the age of 12, Dickens was sent to going to work at a factory. He wrapped and labeled for 6 shillings a week. After work, he wandered through the streets of London, enthralled by the sight of the dockyards, the files of convicts, and vast sections of the city inhabited by the poor. These bitter days remained in his memory and later found expression in his works.
Dickens was able to return to school because a small legacy helped release his father from prison. He was an avid reader and spent much time in the reading room of the British Museum. Although he later returned to school for a time, these experiences left a permanent imprint on the soul of Charles Dickens. Even many years later, he had become a successful author, he could not bear to talk about it, or be reminded of his family’s ignominy.
At the age of fifteen, Dickens began working as an office boy for a law firm. He taught himself and he became a reporter for courts of Doctors’ Common in 1828. The dull routine of the legal profession never interested him, so he became a newspaper reporter for the Mirror of parliament, the True Sun, and finally for the Morning Chronicle. (John Forster, were later his closest friend and biographer, was also employed at the True Sun.) By the age of twenty, Dickens was one of the best parliamentary reporters all the England.
By this time, Dickens was enjoying the luxurious life he had dreamed of as a child. In 1850, he published the last installments of David Copperfield, a partly autobiographical novel that was his favorite.
1.2 The Introduction to the Background
1.2.1 Social background
“Like so many parents I have a favorite child in my heart,” wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield." Here, Dickens made good use of his own life experience to expose the social evils that were prevalent in Victorian England and were the miseries of child-labor, the tyranny in schools, the debtors’ prison, as well as the cruelty and immortality and the treachery. Thus the novel was not merely a personal record, but a broad picture of the society of the author’s day.
David Copperfield was a novel written in first-person point of view. It was sometimes referred to as an apprenticeship novel because it centered on the period in which a young person grew up. The type of novels was pioneered by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Dickens based the book in part on the difficult early years of his own life. The narration changed names, locales, and other details of Dickens’s life. For example, when Dickens was only a child, he had to leave school to work in a factory. In the novel, David Copperfield had to leave school to work in a warehouse washing and labeling bottles used in the wine trade. David’s initials (D.C.) were, of course, the reverse of Dickens’s (C.D.). 
Dickens was a master at drawing memorable characters. Some were simple and uncomplicated, like Barkis, Creakle, Murdstone, and Clara Peggotty. Others were complex, like David Copperfield. Throughout the novel, he befriended the wealthy and charming James Steerforth, ignoring his devious and malevolent side. At the same time, he befriended the good-hearted Tommy Traddles and the humble Peggottys. These two worlds, the world of Steerforth and the world of Steerforth and his family, both attracted David, and his immaturity decided what should constitute his own world. To bring his characters to life, Dickens invested them with clearly defining virtues or vices and described the characters in a way that enabled the readers to picture them at the scenes in which they appeared.
1.2.2 Novel’s background
Of all the Dickens’ novels, David Copperfield reflected the events of Dickens own life the most. As for David, suffering in the past was adequately made up for a rich, happy marriage and a successful literary career, just like Dickens himself, and the world was still full of hope and sunshine. The plot construction was rather loose, but it also excelled in its vivid image. The narration of novel in detail was also worth mentioning, which gave the work truthfulness to the real life.
What we could add to was the way in which Dickens time and time again dealt with the progress of a male hero who, as with David in David Copperfield (1849-50) and Pip in Great Expectations (1860-1), came to terms with world as the middle-class values. At the same time, however, Dickens’ heroes often have uncomfortable doubles: David Copperfield was shadowed by Heep and Steerforth, both of whom revealed the kind of dark sexual urge that David attempted to conceal or deny in his own life. It was as if, in a new middle-class code, Dickens was equally aware of the precariousness or vulnerability of the new respectable social conception of the self, of the buried life that was hidden beneath the veneer of polite manners.
Due to the early success, the public not only gave Dickens an assurance that made sure increasing powers of poetic expression and narrative technique, but also the confidence to demonstrate his priorities to a point where they contradicted the social assumptions of many of his readers. All his later novels, except A Tale of Two Cities, presented a criticism of the most fundamental institutions of the Victorian England.
Although David was ignorant of Steerforth’s treachery, we were aware from the moment we met Steerforth that he didn’t deserve of praise which David felt toward him. David didn’t know why he hated Heep or why he trusted a boy with a donkey cart who stole his money and left him in the road, but it was possible for him to realize Heep’s inherent evil and the boy’s real intention. In David’s first-person narration, Dickens conveyed the wisdom of the older man implicitly, through the eyes of a child.

Chapter 2
Literature Review of the Novel

2.1 Some Scholars’ Views on the Novel
Scholars believed that David Copperfield's careers, friendships, love and life, were most highly influenced by Dickens' experiences, as well as his time working as a child. David's involvement with the law profession and later his career as a writer mirror the experiences of Dickens. Many of David's friends were based on people who Dickens actually knew, and David's wives, Agnes Wickfield and Dora, were believed to be based upon Dickens' attachment to Mary Hogarth. Dickens keenly felt his lack of education during his time at that factory, and according to the Forster biography, it was from these times that he drew David's working period.
British writer Somerset Maugham regarded the book as "truly a masterpiece of literary works".
One of American literature connoisseurs recommended the novel as one hundreds of the 20th century, distinguishing English novel.
The famous Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, said that the book was the best one among all the English novels and it could help people to build a perfect personality.
 “David Copperfield was filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality,” noted Somerset Maugham. “They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother.” The story was told almost entirely from the point view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to do so. Dickens based the book in part on the difficult early years of his own life.
2.2 Main Views of Dickens’ Idea
Influenced by Carlyle, Dickens learned to direct his novel to a questioning of social priorities and inequalities, to a distrust of institutions, particularly defunct or malfunctioning ones, and to a pressure for action and earnestness He was prone to take up issues, and to campaign against what he saw as injustice or desuetude, using fiction in his novel. He was not alone in his own time, but his name continued to be popularly associated with good causes and with remedies because he was quite the wittiest and he has had the most persuasive, and the most influential voice.
Dickens was faithful to the teaching, and to the general framework, his thought, his action and above all, for his writing, nevertheless. A critical awareness that there was something deeply wrong with the society in which he lived disclosed the nature of a novel and gave its distinct political edge. Dickens’ novels were multifarious, digressive and humorous.
In an important way, they reflected the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies, its eccentricities and its constrictions, its energy and its fertility, both physical and intellectual. But the standard pattern in his novels was the basic conflict between money on the one hand, and loves on the other hand. What this conflict usually revealed was that the people who have greatest love for their fellow humans were also the ones who were most hurt by the world of money, simply because money was power.
In his novels, the people who possessed most money and most power seemed incapable of love, whereas the people who were capable of love were remarkably often both poor and powerless. And yet, this gloomy view was emerged by Dickens’ comic way of dealing with his characters.

Chapter 3
The Image of main character in David Copperfield

3.1 The Image of David
3.1.1 Unyielding and diligence of David Copperfield
David Copperfield was a kind-hearted, honest, and hard working, pragmatic and progressive intellectual typically. Since David’s childhood, his father died. Although his mother remarried, she died before long with his stepfather abuse. At that time, he was sent to boarding school, ravaged, and then was sent to the factory as an apprentice humiliation position. He left the factory to the home of aunt Betsey who adopted him and let him study law. Then, he tried his best to learn day after day. At the same time, his character matured in suffering, frustration, and ultimately on the right path in life. Later he became a writer, and married with his girlfriend. For him, he had acquired much knowledge in life through the wrong ideas, funny habits, sad moment and the depressing day, and remembered his aunt's words in heart, “whatever you do and whenever you do it, you can never be humble, never be hypocritical or cruel.” He thought of this sentence, which always encouraged himself to be strong and seize the hard-on opportunity to struggle in life.
Both the hardships and bitterness in his orphan’s times or always struggle in his adult time, having experienced calamities and misfortunes, David tasted the joy and warmth of the earth. By his own sincerity, forthright personality, positive spirit, as well as the purity of love to people in his heart, he persisted and finally succeeded.
3.1.2 Innocence and kindness of David Copperfield.
David began to love Emily when they accompanied each other in the days in Yarmouth. As for a child, the affection was a more feelings. Neither of them worried about the future or any other troubles at that time. The best was love in that they were innocent. On the way to Salen House, the writer mentioned an interested incident. With the “simple confidence and natural reliance of a child upon superior years”, David was used by Servant William. David was bound to lack of some worldly wisdom and was only an innocent child.
When David worked at Murdestone and Grinby, he met Mr.Micawber whose clothes were shabby, and had only a shirt collar. However, David did not laugh at him. On the contrary, when he learned about the tragedy and realized Micawber’s financial difficulties, he intended to offer some money to Mr.Micawber in order to help him tide over the difficulties, though he himself was poor at that moment. Innocence was the most valuable and shinning characteristic of David Copperfield.
In David’s life, although he met some wicked people like Mr. and Miss Murdestone, Mr. Creakle and Uriah Heep, he also gained a lot of friends and helpers who made him kind-hearted. That was to say, though he had known some bad qualities of the people, David remained what he used to be. In Mr. Murdestone’s house, except his mother, Peggotty was the only one who loved David, and different from his mother